Okay, I've been reading through the Ortho PDF and identifying problems that need to be worked out in order to make this setting shine. For the most part, I'm going to just ignore problems with spelling or grammar for now, in part because the sheer number of different misspellings for simple words like "mountain" would fill pages, never mind the hard to spell ones. Rather, this has to do with certain vagueries and errors of a more conceptual error. A few of these I touched on over at the To Do List, but many of these are just things I've noticed. Anyway, here goes:
We're supposed to be writing from a Prime point of view!
I know this is a Planescape board, and using words like "dark" instead of mysterious and "power" instead of "god" is second nature to most of us (hell it took me a hundred pages to notice), but Ortho isn't Planescape. Ortho is its own independent setting with its own feel and flavor, and the locals most certainly do not speak Planar Cant. Refering to the entire population of Ortho, or even just its government as "The Harmonium," is what a Planar would do. An actual citizen of Ortho would only ever use the word "Harmonium" to describe the millitary. Ortho will never feel like its own setting if we insist on treating it like just another part of Planescape.
The same goes for less obvious quirks of perspective. Using a passage from a Guvner guide to Ortho is a useful conceit, but, for the most part, the Campaign Setting should read like it was written on Ortho by actual Orthorians. At the very least we should include a more excepts from Orthorian literature and more "man on the street" type input from prominent and not so prominent Orthorians. Sort of like what we did with the quotes from various bloods in the later chapters of the PSCS. Why do we need to do this? Well, because...
Ortho feels empty!
Here and there we'll see a breif blurb about the students at the College of the Choir, or the plight of the poor Orthorian Dyers toiling away in dangerous but necessary work while the rest of society shuns them, but for the most part, Ortho seems like it's inhabited more by ideas and groups than actual people. Take the otherwise great write-up on Harmony's Glory, for instance. We are given the District's demographics, industries, and styles of architecture, but we are told very little about the beliefs, desires, and cultural quirks of the people who live there. The only people who are mentioned at all are various high ups, and they are only given brief descriptions. If I decided to start running an Ortho game today, I would have no idea what an ordinary barkeep in Harmony's Glory would act like. That's a problem. Of course, the biggest reason for this problem is...
Ortho needs more NPCs!
Finally we come to what may well be the heart of the matter. Ortho doesn't have nearly enough NPCs, and the ones it does have tend to be poorly defined. that's why the provinces seem empty and undefined, and it also may be why we've been having so much trouble getting into the Orthorian mindset. This is currently the only problem I'm actually doing anything about (although I did recruit a friend to help solve the Beholder problem -- more on that later). I'm currenly making slow progress down a simply massive list of NPCs that need to be described and/or statted. I'm chipping away at them, but it's really slow going and I could use all the help I can get. This, of course, has lead to me discovering another problem...
Beholders make lousy characters!
It's not so much that Beholders are hard to conceptualize and write personalities for (although there is a bit of that), so much as the fact that the race itself really unwieldy to use. I won't go into the nitty gritty of it, but suffice to say that Beholders are quite difficult to make and use as NPCs and next to impossible to use as PCs. Official attempts to make them usable, such as the unspeakably ill-concieved Beholder Mage in Lords of Madness, have simply made things harder and our own attempts to make them work haven't been terribly ambitious or well-executed. No offense, but the Beholder Monster Class we have now is a total mess and probably isn't even worth fixing.
I've recruited a friend of mine to come up with a way to make Beholders playable as PCs and he has come up with a clever -- if somewhat unorthodox way to fix the problem. Expect to hear from him soon. This of course creates its own problems in that the beholders we already have will need to be re-statted, but we don't actually have that many finished beholders, so it shouldn't be a huge deal. Anyway, let's move onto bigger fish.
We have a problem with terminology!
The following terms have been used incorrectly, overly-broadly, or inconsistently throughout the text: Hardhead, Harmonium, the state, and Knights of Harmony. This is probably an incomplete list.
What's the deal with the demographics?
Beholders reproduce slowly and infrequently, have long life-cyles, and have in the past participated in massive internal genocidal wars that brought the entire race to its knees. On top of that, they are insular, xenophobic, and not terribly fond of other races, so why are there so many in the other provinces? About a third of the the provinces with listed demographics are currenly listed as being five, ten, or even fifteen percent beholder. Keep in mind, most of thes provinces have populations numbering in the millions. That would mean that in provinces like Iirondia that are 15% beholder there are hundreds of thousands of Beholders floating around. I'm not sure there are supposed to be that many beholders in all of Kel'nin.
But while the Beholders are bizarrely numerous, other races, particularly dwarves, kobolds, and minor races that are hardly mentioned, are strangly under-populated. Combine these problems with the number of provinces that have no listed demographics at all, and its clear that more work needs to be done on that front.
We need more info on Ortho's government!
So far, we have nothing established as to how Octaves and Councilors are selected, whether Octaves can be impeached, what the various rules of discourse are, and a million other things. I plan to work on a full write-up on Ortho's government, as soon as I finish populating the Octave, but it may be a little while.
*Thread touch so I get updates on it*
And yeah - you're pretty much right on the money here about the things missing. For some reason in the first round of development NPCS were like the red-headed step-child of design. They're a dire need.
And I've actually got an answer for you on the demographics issues - which is namely that the current numbers are at best, placeholders.